Um, Google copied Apple? I don't think so. They're all copying each other. The only thing Apple really brought to the market was true multi-touch. Just about everything else already existed in some fashion. The patent wars going on right now reflect just what is happening: HTC sues Apple, Microsoft sues HTC; Motorola sues Apple, Apple sues Motorola and on and on ad nauseum.
You could say that Apple "copied" Google by putting multi-tasking on the latest iPhone because Google had it since the beginning. Or, that Google copied Blackberry because they had it before Android even existed. No one is really "copying" (i.e., "stealing") anything.

Certainly there were smartphones before iPhone, I used them, but iPhone redefined the category. It was the first slate that was usable, the first on screen keyboard that worked. When Apple showed the iPhone everyone in the industry said you can't have a device without a physical keyboard - that was a known decided industry knowledge and the iPhone could not succeed. Then they all went out to copy the iPhone as fast as possible because as soon as anyone touched it clearly it was better to have a full screen to work with. Look at the first Android prototypes, which were like Palms of BBs, look at the G1 and now look at the Nexus One and S. Clearly there is a trajectory there and it is away from the G1 and towards the iPhone. There was no conflict between Google and Android when the G1 shipped. The fur flew when Google shipped the Nexus with all the buttons and ports in the same places as the iPhone and then enabled multi-touch. There was no question what Google was targeting at that point.

A lot of the concepts that you see on the Android just did not exist before the iPhone introduced them. Look at copy and paste on Gingerbread, it's pretty damn close to iPhone. The music players. A lot of stuff on there just looks fully like the iPhone. That is not a coincidence. The Google founders and even Andy Rubin where proud to say how they liked the iPhone and used the iPhone before the first Android shipped.

And multi-tasking always existed on the iPhone, it was based on OSX, it just was not opened up to 3rd party devs until recently. You could always listen to the iPod app in the background.

Hey I get that you are a big Fandroid. There is cool innovation going on on Android platform, some coming from Google and some clearly from the hardware makers. There is a lot of smartness about Google's go to market strat and clearly they have a ton of traction and success with hardware makers and finding an audience with consumers. Nav, Gmail innovation, openness to add-ons - all of that stuff is quite impressive.

At the same time, there is also a lot of crap. Stuff that does not work. Low expectations for this and that. Apps on Android just don't look as good as on iPhone - even from the same vendor. Every time a major Android ships I go to the store and dedicate a bunch of time to playing with it and testing it myself. I am always trying to keep an open mind but I am amazed by how badly stuff on it works. It's painful. Just damn unintuitive, slow, hard to use, hard to predict what buttons do, bad scrolling, buttons on the bottom that just plain don't work 1/2 the time. Downloading an app the store warns you about what APIs the app will use. That's madness. I tried to use the radio on an EVO at a Sprint store and the clerks were like, you need headphones. Ok I had some, still didn't work. Ok, you need special headphones I'm told. Where can I get them? No one has them. Sprint people have no idea - this is their flagship product yet no one expects it to work - what is that about? Stuff like that just does not get reported. It's all about hype. Hyped new features that may be cool but a lot of big passes on rough edges and geeky stuff that my mom or my sister could never comprehend. Now we have the leader of Android admitting that it's a platform for geeks right now. Uh, ok - did all customers realize that when they bought those messy devices? It's not all roses. As nice as some of those devices with bigger screens may be, my 2 year old iPhone works smooth as silk even on all the latest updates. It's easy to use, no fear in the appstore of some offshore company grabbing my addressbook etc, etc.